


In All the Great Wide Universe

by Snickfic



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/F, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Soul Bond, human/non-human - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-11 03:32:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13515747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: The resonance that had grown to a whine in Gamora’s jaw and wrists—stilled. The world fell suddenly, utterly silent, but for the rush of Jane Foster’s pulse. Even Gamora’s four shipmates, so far away, were quiet.Jane Foster looked down at their joined hands and then up at Gamora again. “Oh.”





	In All the Great Wide Universe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ifimightchime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifimightchime/gifts).



> Dear recip, I hope you like where I took this ship! I saw your chosen family likes and took it as an opportunity to write an idea for GotG that I've been wanting ever since I first saw the movie, although that element ended up being just background. Anyway, I love this ship and was glad to get the chance to write it. I hope you enjoy. <3

It took Gamora’s stolen hyperskimmer eight jumps to reach the coordinates she’d been given. Each jump stretched her a little thinner, as though the piece of her anchored to the _Quadrant_ , to the people within, might snap at any moment. 

It wouldn’t. She held the conviction tight to her, like certainty. Peter, Drax, Rocket, Groot: they were all hers now, no escape. So instead she stretched and stretched until she felt taut as a lyre string.

The last jump dropped her into orbit around a white planet, criss-crossed with fissures of blue. “Niflheim,” she repeated to herself, and began her descent. She put out a call, and soon enough a cheerful female voice directed her towards the gate of the alliance’s hidden mountain safehouse, on this frozen hidden planet.

It was a good thing the hyperskimmer was so small. Any bigger and Gamora wouldn’t have been able to land it in the hangar, which was in fact a cave. Behind her, gates of ice shuddered slowly shut until the only light was the blue glow of torches that lined the walls. A door opposite the gates of ice was flung suddenly open, and someone more or less Gamora’s size rushed through. “Is she here?” 

There was no one in the hangar but Gamora. She hefted her pack a little higher on her shoulder and waited for the figure to approach. As she stood there, she felt the most peculiar sensation, as though someone had rung a bell in her bones, as though they were resonating in tune with… something.

The person was a woman—a Terran, Thor’s team had told them. Jane Foster. From the swath of furs wrapped around her Jane Foster stuck out a thin, pale hand. “Great to meet you,” she said, eyes shining. Gamora had spent enough time around Peter to know what was meant to happen next. She took Jane Foster’s hand.

The resonance that had grown to a whine in Gamora’s jaw and wrists—stilled. The world fell suddenly, utterly silent, but for the rush of Jane Foster’s pulse. Even Gamora’s four shipmates, so far away, were quiet.

Jane Foster looked down at their joined hands and then up at Gamora again. “Oh.”

\--

Gamora had come to Niflheim expecting to be examined, scanned, each detail of her mind and body picked over and talked out and finally dismissed as irrelevant. She had not looked forward to it, but Peter was knee-deep in planning with the Nova Corps for Thanos’s next assault, Rocket said he’d be no good because of his augmentation—never mind that Gamora had plenty of that, too—and Drax flat-out refused. _It’s private. I share it with my friends, not with strangers_ , he’d said, and refused to hear any more on the subject.

Nobody told her Jane Foster, the alliance’s best hope at understanding infinity stones, had held one, too.

“Well, I didn’t really _hold_ it,” Jane said. She sat across from Gamora in the commissary, her hands wrapped around a mug of something hot and spicy-sweet. Gamora sipped at hers. It was barely warmer here than in the hangar, although apparently there were hot springs deeper inside the mountain, where they all bathed. “It wasn’t a stone, like the others. At least, we think all the others are stones. But this one was—Thor didn’t tell you about the Aether? Really?”

“He said you had experience with them,” Gamora said.

“Well, he’s not _wrong_ ,” Jane said. Her mouth twisted with something other than humor. “The Aether is a—I mean it’s a—look, it’s a non-Newtonian fluid,” she said, and searched Gamora’s eyes for understanding. “Okay, no. It sort of floats through the air? Whoosh.” She demonstrated with her hands, shifting them one way and another, then brought her fingers closer and closer to her eyes, until they crossed. Then she abruptly dropped her hands to the table. “Like that.”

“It—entered you?” Gamora said.

Jane’s mouth opened, closed again. “Uh, yeah. Basically. It was not my favorite.”

“It was unpleasant,” Gamora ventured.

“Little bit,” Jane said drily. “Wasn’t it unpleasant for you? Your infinity stone? Wait, I have to get this down. Crap, where’s my log—aha.” From within the voluminous furs she produced a flat device. After tapping it a few times, she looked up again, alert and waiting. “Tell me everything.”

“It was—overpowering. It was like I was connected. My friends and I, like we were all one.”

“One person?”

“One—galaxy. Vast. I don’t know how to describe it. But even after it was over, after Peter put the stone in the containment sphere—we were still connected. We still are. I can feel them.” Under Jane’s stare of wonder, Gamora felt suddenly awkward. “Surely Thor told you this. It’s why you wanted to see one of us.”

“Well, I could have used more of you, to help triangulate, or—but yes, one of you is great.” Jane smiled brightly, white teeth and brown eyes that sparkled with a half-dozen hues. 

“And now we’re connected,” Gamora said. “You and I. By the stones.”

Jane was already shaking her head. “I mean, I’m sure that whatever that was in the outer cave was just some kind of realignment of the essences, you know, like a static charge, you get zapped once and it’s gone—”

Gamora gripped Jane’s hand, and for only the second time in a year Gamora was alone in her own skin. Except not, because Jane sat across the table, eyes huge and uncertain. Her hand was cool and slender in Gamora’s grip; her breath was shallow, her lips parted, and looking at them stirred something in Gamora, like the faintest puff of air from an on-board recycler.

“I don’t know about this,” Jane said, slipping her hand from Gamora’s.

“Isn’t that why you’re here, on this forsaken planet? To find out?”

“Good point,” Jane said, frowning with great concentration at Gamora’s palm. “Okay, so. The lab?”

\--

The initial examination was exactly as dull and irritating as Gamora had imagined. There was another scientist there, too, a sober pink-skinned woman the Nova Corps had sent. She’d been buried under this mountain for seventy-three standard days, she told Gamora, while she scanned Gamora’s body with a hand-held device. It had blinking lights on it.

They asked Gamora about how it had felt when she’d made skin-to-skin contact with Peter—and with the infinity stone by extension. How it had felt when she let go. When she’d first noticed Peter and Drax and Rocket on the edge of her awareness, even when they were out of sight. Jane held a voice recorder through it all, her brown eyes fixed on Gamora’s face, her bottom lip often caught between her teeth. The way she hung onto each answer made the questions a little easier for Gamora to bear.

“That’s enough for a first round,” Jane said finally, mercifully. “Are you hungry? I’m hungry.”

There were other people in the commissary now. Gamora met Sif and Valkyrie. “We’re the muscle,” Valkyrie said. Sif nodded soberly and downed another tankard of the sour-sweet stuff they were drinking—mead, they called it. “Not like Thanos is going to look for us here on fucking Niflheim—” 

“—but if he does—” Sif interjected.

“—we’ll be ready.” Valkyrie cracked her knuckles.

Gamora felt Jane’s eyes on her all through her first bowl of stew. And her second. And halfway through her third, when finally the hollow feeling of hunger began to ease. “I have a high metabolism,” Gamora said.

“Like an Asgardian,” Valkyrie said approvingly, and knocked her tankard against Gamora’s.

“Volstagg would have liked you,” Sif said quietly. A silence fell at the table. Gamora didn’t ask.

Conversations started up again soon enough, Jane teasing Sif about some old joke between them. Valkyrie demanded an explanation, but Gamora only understood half of it when it was given—her translator didn’t know what to do with words like _bifrost_ or _Fandral_ and left them untranslated.

Her eyes kept drifting back to Jane. Jane’s eyes flashed sometimes with an alien, unfamiliar warmth that seemed to warm Gamora, too. Her hands moved constantly, speaking a language of their own that sometimes supplemented, sometimes contradicted the words she spoke. Sometimes, Gamora met Jane’s startled gaze, as though Jane was surprised to find herself looking at Gamora at all. As the meal and then the after-meal wore on, aided by the mead, Gamora found Jane looking back more and more. 

Somewhere out in the galaxy, Thanos was preparing his next offensive, but that seemed unfathomably far from this place, under a mountain on a inhospitable throwaway planet that didn’t even have native space travel. The _Quadrant_ was out there somewhere, too, its residents a constant murmur in Gamora’s blood. But they would always be with her, and Jane so easily might not.

Valkyrie and Sif drank heavily, as if the mead couldn’t touch them. They came nearer and nearer to blows until finally they staggered off together to a sparring room, so they could solve their dispute ‘honestly’.

“Sif wasn’t always like this,” Jane said, watching them go. 

After a moment Gamora realized she was apologizing. “She’s grieving.” Jane’s gaze snapped to Gamora, startled. Gamora shrugged. “Drax is much the same when he drinks. And Rocket,” she added after a moment’s thought. “We’re all—we’ve all lost something.”

Jane nodded thoughtfully, her bottom lip between her teeth. “With the Aether—I feel like I lost _myself_. I can never be clean. It’s never _gone_. Crap, you don’t want to hear about this.” She pushed to her feet. “Do you want me to show you the bunk room? That’d be a good idea.”

Gamora picked up her dishes and followed Jane to the kitchen. “Just dump them here, I’ll get them later,” Jane said. Then she was off again, striding down the stone corridor as though she were trying to outpace something. She couldn’t outpace Gamora, anyway—her legs were much shorter.

The bunk room was just another cavern, low-ceilinged and dimly lit, lined with rows of pallets. Some were already in use—Gamora saw Zor, the Xandarian scientist, already asleep in the corner. “Do you sleep here, too?” Gamora asked.

“Uh, no. I mean sometimes, in theory, but I fell asleep in the lab so often that Sif dragged a bunk into the equipment room for me.”

Gamora measured her words carefully. “I would like to see it,” she said. Jane’s eyes were as dark as the depths of space, huge enough for galaxies to turn in. “If you’d like to show it to me,” Gamora added.

Jane stared up at her a moment longer, and then she reached for Gamora’s hand again. Instantly the background noise of Gamora’s life stilled. The universe’s walls collapsed until Gamora and Jane were the only people in it. “This way,” Jane said.

Gamora was already familiar with the lab, of course, but Jane led her into the back of the cavern, where a tunnel took a turn into a much smaller space, barely more than an alcove. Stacks of crates towered against one wall, and at the other was a pallet piled high with blankets. “I get cold,” Jane said.

In other circumstances, Gamora could have reached for Peter and found some quip in response. But Jane’s fingers were still wound around hers, and Gamora could hear nothing and no one except the Jane’s slightly quickened breath. Here, with Jane, Gamora was her own again. “Let me kiss you,” Gamora said.

“Isn’t this—weird?” Jane asked, a little breathless.

“Does it feel weird?”

Jane considered for a moment, a slight wrinkle in her forehead. “No,” she said finally, and turned her face upward, as if Gamora were a sun.

Jane’s lips were warm and yielding and soft. She opened her mouth to Gamora, and she tasted of the mead they’d drunk at dinner. She shivered as Gamora cupped her jaw and chased deeper into her mouth. Another adjustment of Gamora’s hand, and Gamora found her fingers in Jane’s hair. It fell out of its loose bun almost at a touch. She buried her hands in it and kissed Jane and kissed her and kissed her.

“Come to bed,” Jane said at last. She tugged Gamora towards the pallet, into the pile of furs. Gamora followed.

\--

Gamora woke to Jane’s steady breathing. Gamora dug around in the furs until her fingers bumped against her personal comm, unstrapped from her wrist and discarded the night before. It said morning had come to Niflheim’s surface, far above. Morning had come to the _Quadrant_ , too; she felt Drax’s hunger and Rocket’s fidgety irritation.

Jane rolled over and opened her eyes. They gleamed in the glow of the one ever-burning blue torch—a nightlight, she’d called it. “Hi,” she said, smiling. Gamora bent down to kiss her, and the world went still.

When Gamora pulled away again, the words were there waiting for her, almost as if she’d thought of them herself: “This connection we have seems important, don’t you think? We should probably collect more data.”

“Oh, you think so?” Jane said, eyes sparkling. “Collecting data _is_ very important.”

Gamora kissed her again and laid a palm upon her breast. Gasping, Jane tugged Gamora closer. 

Out there was the _Quadrant_ and Xandar and Thanos. Jane would need to return to her work soon, and Gamora eventually to the stars. But for a few moments more, there was no urgent battle, no coming war. There was no one for Gamora but Jane.

[end]


End file.
